Professional Mastering - Analog & Digital
Professional Mastering
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Using reverb during mastering isn’t very common, but knowing when and how to use it is a valuable skill for any producer, mixing, or mastering engineer.
Furthermore, I’ve been noticing increasingly disjointed-sounding recordings, in which it’s easy to tell the instruments and samples were not recorded in similar environments.
So, I have a feeling that adding reverb during mastering will become increasingly relevant. It’s an incredibly difficult effect to get right, considering how easily it can ruin a mix, which makes this all the more important a topic to understand.
In this video, we’ll go over some valuable concepts to understand before deciding if you should add reverb to a master, what reverb functions are valuable for mastering with reverb, and some techniques you can use to improve the results.
So let’s get into Reverb on a Master: Everything You Need to Know
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I feel like this goes without saying, but if you need to add reverb to a master, you need to find the most realistic unit or plugin possible. Since we’re affecting the entire mix, whatever we choose can potentially have a significant and negative effect on the mix.
Stylistic reverb can work well during mixing if you’re trying to follow a specific genre’s sound or make a creative decision.
But when it comes to mastering, you truly want something that changes the timbre of the music as realistically and subtly as possible.
What you choose is, of course, up to you, but I prefer and recommend this IAmReverb convolution reverb plugin, since it accurately emulates reverb reflections from multiple distances.
Other impulse response plugins will work well, but have issues emulating close reflections without introducing phase cancellation, so again, I think this plugin is the best choice.
I’ll be using this for the rest of the video, but feel free to follow along with whatever reverb you have currently.
Watch the video to learn more >
Reverb during mastering or on a stereo mix bus serves a very similar purpose to bus compression.
When compressing a stereo mix, the goal is to tie elements together by introducing more uniform dynamics to all recordings simultaneously.
Reverb serves a very similar role, but by controlling the perception of the signals within a finite space, and their collective ADSR.
It helps to think about this on a spectrum.
If each recording in a project has a distinct decay rate and set of reflections, they’ll naturally sound distinct. The overall recording won’t sound cohesive - again, this is a pretty common issue with today’s recordings, in which samples were recorded in one room, the vocals in another, the guitar is DI with amp emulation, and so on. We’ve kind of lost the sound of a group of performers in a room.
On the other end of the spectrum, everything has nearly the same decay rate and reflections - in turn, it’s difficult to hear each instrument, since it’s all blurring together. This happens with too much reverb, which means we need to be very careful if we use reverb during mastering, since we can easily cause or worsen this issue if we’re not careful.
Ideally, our mix and master is somewhere in the middle - the various signals are distinct enough to be intelligible and understandable, but still sound like a cohesive unit.
If the mix is somewhere lower in this spectrum, that being somewhere between a complete lack of cohesion and the ideal level of cohesion, then adding reverb during mastering can be beneficial if done carefully.
It goes without saying, but if the mix is already blurring the lines between instruments, introducing more reverb will only exacerbate that.
So, adding reverb during mastering is done to create cohesion when a mix lacks it - and should absolutely be avoided if the mix already has significant temporal effects.
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Temporal effects like reverb and delay have a way of sneaking up on you during mastering.
The process of mastering almost always brings up quieter details. Meanwhile, reverb reflections and delay taps often exist in the lower amplitude ranges.
For that reason, I recommend establishing a rough version of your master’s dynamics before introducing reverb.
So, upward compression and limiting should be applied to get a more accurate sense of temporal effect levels.
If at that point, reverb is still needed, insert the reverb into the chain - ideally after upward compression, but of course, before peak limiting.
Then, adjust the reverb settings while keeping the limiter enabled - again, to get an accurate idea of the reverb’s final level.
Additionally, be sure to listen to both the quieter sections and louder sections of the song - the settings you choose may work well during a loud section, but be too aggressive during sparse sections in which the reverb will be more audible.
Alternatively, the settings may sound great during sparse sections, but seriously affect the transients and intelligibility once a busier part of the song hits.
If there’s no good middle ground, automating the mix amount for each section is a good solution.
So, let’s listen to a mix with what seems like appropriate amounts of reverb while the limiter is disabled. Then, I’ll enable the limiter with gain compensation, and notice how the reverb quickly becomes too audible, necessitating new, subtler reverb settings.
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When picking a reverb to use while mastering, it’s important to find one that includes an EQ section.
We generally think of a reverb’s EQ as a way to shape the reverb’s sound, which is true.
But in this case, we can think of this EQ as a way to either increase or decrease the perceived cohesion in a given range.
For example, say the lows sound cohesive, but the mids around 1.5kHz, and the highs around 6kHz sound disjointed - as if the instruments occupying those areas were recorded in different environments.
In this example, we could lower the response of the reverb’s reflections in the lows, while amplifying them in the mid and high ranges, in which we’ve noticed this issue.
Amplifying or attenuating the reflections in this instance literally alters the reverb’s cohesive effect on a frequency range.
Without this ability, we’re stuck affecting the full spectrum uniformly - which will rarely be the best approach.
Additionally, a reverb with controllable early/late reflections will be incredibly helpful, if not needed, in most situations.
For example, this IAmReverb plugin includes impulse responses of the close, mid-distance, and far reflections or room positions.
Say the mix has the appropriate amount of reverb; however, the settings used only emphasize late reflections. This combination of a dry signal, then a long decay that can only be heard after masking, does not create a realistic sense of depth.
In this instance, reverb during mastering could be used to introduce those early and mid reflections - bridging the gap between the dry and late reflections.
Or perhaps the mixer or the reverbs they used introduced early and late reflections, but don’t have the mid-distance, to again, create that realistic transition needed to establish depth.
In that case, mid-distance reflections, ideally matched to the perceived reverb used in the mix, and equalized as needed, will fix that issue.
So, let’s listen to reverb being used to affect the cohesion to varying extents for each frequency range, and then, create realistic depth by filling in the gaps of the mix.
Notice how subtly the effect is used - again, a little goes a long way, so you’ll need to use your ears.